I love my job — really, really love my job, to such a degree that I regularly worry that I can’t possibly do well enough to live up to the opportunity of it. But there’s a catch. (Well, there are two catches. The other one is that the pay kinda stinks for now.) You see, a good chunk of the position that I’m in is paid for by a UK government grant that encourages businesses and universities to collaborate on research-and-development projects. That part is great, but a chunk of the money spent on the scheme goes toward giving all of us who participate training in management in accordance with the UK’s Management and Leadership National Occupational Standards, leading toward a Level 5 Diploma in Management and Leadership, granted by the Chartered Management Institute. Does that sound like a clusterfuck of bureaucracy to you? It should. Still, I’ve been giving it a chance, and not just because I didn’t have much of a choice.
I was wary of this aspect of the job to begin with, but I can grudgingly admit that I’m at a point in my career where it might be time to accept that I’ll be stuck forever unless I can stop being just a specialist and move ahead a bit. As much as it pains me to think about a lot of things that I’ve always counted on mangers to deal with for me, I realize that my reluctance is a good sign that I should probably at least take a stab at learning some of this stuff instead of consciously avoiding it.
This training amounts to four modules: one online (a total nightmare in terms of user experience, and I’m still not sure what the point of it was), and three week-long courses covering the bulk of the material. This is all administered by a cascade of sub-contracted companies, from the government’s initiative to a coalition of funding bodies to a company that manages the scheme to the trainers hired by the managing company to teach the curriculum devised by the CMI for the benefit of the universities and companies who employ each of us actually getting trained and certified. (See my note about a clusterfuck of bureaucracy.)
So think about the money trickling down a chain like that. And consider the expense of taking a dozen or two groups of about 20 people, plus two or more trainers for each group, and trapping them in a remote hotel for a week at a time — including three meals a day, plus coffee and danish — to sit in a meetings room with some AV equipment and binders filled with course documents. For three separate weeks, not to mention the time and money involved in having the trainers assess the 15,000 words or so worth of written assignments we’re expected to complete to get certified. that’s a LOT of money invested in pushing forward this certification agenda.
And you know what? The training sucks. Although I can see the merits of the topics and information given lip service in the standards and the curriculum, the actual experience is a lot like taking school kids and teaching them a certain standardized test, rather than teaching them how to think in a useful way that will allow them to understand the material being tested.
I’m in the middle of the final residential module, and I’m at wit’s end. I’ve struggled all along, trying to calm myself and convince myself that maybe I’ve actually worked too long for this stuff to seem new, or that the training method isn’t really suited to my learning style, or that I’m just really resistant to the material. And granted, there is probably some truth to all of that. However, I’m not a lone voice of discontent. The trainers spend a lot of time belaboring pretty simple ideas, while they just gloss over or race through pretty complex material. Lot of time is spent doing group activities that are essentially trite metaphors illustrating straightforward concepts, instead of giving us chances to really work out how to apply ideas to our own industries and situations.
They’ve made it clear that despite all the lofty rhetoric, the written work really is expected to just regurgitate ideas from the curriculum in a mechanical way, just like in the written portion of a standardized test. People have already been penalized for too much critical thinking and discursiveness. It’s grim, and at this point my bad experiences with the training and the material has utterly undermined any value I might have placed on the certification itself, and the standards its meant to uphold.
[As an aside, it makes me furious that this bullshit certification based on robotic responses to three weeks’ worth of subpar training offers the equivalent value to my master’s degree when it comes to tabulating points that will help someone get a work visa in this country.]
I’m not good with anger. I don’t know how to deal with it, I don’t know how to let off steam, and it just spreads through me like poison. And the last few days of being trapped in a shabby hotel in the middle of nowhere wasting time with this nonsense is making me quake with rage. (It didn’t help that yesterday was my birthday and I was trapped here, either.) And I’m only halfway through the week. Thankfully, I can commiserate with a clever and spirited group of people stuck in the same boat: without them, I surely would have gotten all stabby by now. Cross your fingers I don’t Hulk out once and for all before the week is up.
You should kill them.